In The Media

Company

Mike McCready Interviewed On The Jimmy Lloyd Songwriter Showcase

Jimmy asks Music Xray the tough questions.

Ambushed at SXSW

We were ambush-interviewed about Music Xray by a program from Wales at SXSW.

Interview on Music Business Secrets

Music Business Secrets had a website similar to ours on the show a week earlier. They thought that it would be a good idea to interview Mike, our CEO so that fans of the show could get a better understanding of why we are different and how we are moving towards a true A&R platform.
Note: Mike comes on about an hour into the show in case you want to skip ahead but Franky does put on a good show so if you have the time tune in to the whole show.

From Numb3rs on CBS

On May 9, 2008 Platinum Blue's hit prediction service was a central part of the story line on the CBS television series Numb3rs. As we've seen before in the NBC series Studio 60: On The Sunset Strip, Platinum Blue makes for good and interesting drama. Music Xray is not always portrayed accurately but that's part of the dramatization. In this episode of Numb3rs (called "Pay To Play"), a music label president is paying radio stations to play songs from one of the artists signed to his label in spite of the fact the public isn't buying while on the other hand he refuses to sign an artist whose Music Xray™ scores are very high. The label owner is even paying the radio stations not to play his songs. It results in murder and intrigue. Thankfully, in this case fiction is stranger than truth.

From a Studio 60 Script

Platinum Blue Gaining Mainstream Awareness – Part of Studio 60 Script

Much to our surprise and delight, for the May 31st, 2007 episode of Studio 60: On The Sunset Strip, Platinum Blue was written into the script.

The plot is that the show within the show is taking a ratings beating and the head of the network, Jack Rudolph (played by Steven Weber) walks into head writer Matt Albie’s (played by Matthew Perry) office and announces he’s invested in a company created by the people behind Platinum Blue! Well as it happens, we know them! Click on the video below to see the brief clip.

From The Guardian

Feature in London's The Guardian

Every day, record company executives try to predict, by gut instinct, whether a pop song will sell a million. But could sophisticated software do the job instead, or even write a chart-topper?

Click here to see the feature on Platinum Blue in London's The Guardian.

From The New Yorker

The Formula

... In a small New York loft, just below Union Square, for example, there is a tech startup called Platinum Blue that consults for companies in the music business. Record executives have tended to be human: though they can tell you how they feel when they listen to a song, they don't believe anyone can know with confidence whether a song is going to be a hit, and historically, fewer than twenty per cent of the songs picked as hits by music executives have fulfilled those expectations.

Read an excerpt from the article in The New Yorker, written by Malcolm Gladwell here.

From The BBC

Making Hit Music Into a Science

A computer program has been developed that the makers claim can dramatically increase your odds of scoring a hit.

From The Economist

Sounds Good?

Software: “Music intelligence” systems that can distinguish hits from misses could change the way pop music is made and marketed.

The versificator, a machine described in George Orwell's novel “1984”, automatically generated music for the hapless masses. The idea of removing humans from the creative process of making music, an art form so able to stir the soul, made for a good joke when the book was published in 1949. But today, computer programmers working in a new field called “music intelligence” are developing software capable of predicting which songs will become hits. This surprisingly accurate technology could profoundly change the way pop music is created.